


and miles to go before I sleep

by theappleppielifestyle



Category: teen wolf - Fandom
Genre: I HAVE A LOT OF DEREK HALE FEELINGS, Pre-Slash, Pre-series Fic, and that she was practically extended family, it's always been my headcanon that mama stilinski was a family friend of the hale's
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-09
Updated: 2012-08-09
Packaged: 2017-11-11 19:21:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theappleppielifestyle/pseuds/theappleppielifestyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the cancer, Grace Stilinski always smelt of orange rinds, and coffee grinds, and sweat under her collar.</p>
<p>Now, Derek can only smell things rotting inside of her- tumours, all bunched in tight wraps around the lining of her stomach, and she looks bird-bone-thin inside the hospital bed.</p>
<p>Derek swallows. He feels like an idiot- he hasn’t been to Beacon Hill in two years, and now here he is, after visiting hours, beside Mrs. Stilinski’s bed and sweating through his clothes despite the air conditioner being cranked up to hypothermic levels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and miles to go before I sleep

Before the cancer, Grace Stilinski always smelt of orange rinds, and coffee grinds, and sweat under her collar.

Now, Derek can only smell things rotting inside of her- tumours, all bunched in tight wraps around the lining of her stomach, and she looks bird-bone-thin inside the hospital bed.

Derek swallows. He feels like an idiot- he hasn’t been to Beacon Hill in two years, and now here he is, after visiting hours, beside Mrs. Stilinski’s bed and sweating through his clothes despite the air conditioner being cranked up to hypothermic levels.

“You didn’t finish,” Grace says, strained. “Back- before you left, you never finished.”

Derek’s smile, when it comes, feels twisted on his lips. “I- yeah. Yeah, sorry. Do you want to hear the rest of it?”

Grace shrugs, and it’s weak and pathetic and such a  _shadow_  of what she used to be- bright and goofy and spilling over everywhere. “Heck, yes. Never heard a story where the wolf’s the good guy.”

Even to his own ears, his laugh sounds pained. “Mom always told it like that, and I never really got over it.”

Grace smiles, and she’s trying, Derek can tell. She’s trying so hard- to keep breathing, to keep going, to hold on until there’s nothing to hold on to. “Sounds like her. Whenever you’re ready, Dee.”

He can hear her heart beating sluggishly, trying to keep up with everything that’s trying to consume her- the chemo, the cancer, the stress of fucking  _living_  while attached to this many wires.

He clears his throat as he remembers: “How’s, uh.”

She lifts an eyebrow, her smile wrecking havoc on her mouth. “Stiles? He’s… fine. Comes to visit every day before and after school, with that Scott kid. Had his eleventh birthday a while back.”

Derek nods, the movement jerky and awkward.

Grace gestures weakly towards him, the plastic on her fingers dragging her down. “You gonna finish the story or what?”

Derek thinks back to the phone call- “ _I have to, Laura. She was mom’s best friend, she was practically family, she doesn’t_ -”

“ _I get it,”_  Laura had said, and her voice had sounded- understanding, almost, with something heavy and metallic behind it. “ _Do what you have to do. Meet me in Maine in two weeks, okay, Dee_?”

And then, the reluctant, rushed: “ _And tell her I said hey_.”

“Yeah,” Derek says over the lump in his throat. “Where was I up to?”

“Red was doing the whole, ‘oh, what big-”

“Right. Okay. Uh.” Derek blinks, hard, under the florescent lights, trying to remember how his mom had told it- the sharp points of her teeth nipping at his nose until he couldn’t stop giggling, the thick ringlets of her hair down her collarbones.

“And- and red riding hood says,  _and what big eyes you have_. The wolf looked at her with- with those huge eyes, and says,  _all the better to see you with, my dear_.”

Derek swallows again, suddenly wanting to be in the woods, running until he gets to the river. “Red riding hood looks at the wolf’s mouth, and says,  _and what big_ fangs _you have_. And the wolf opens his bright, bright mouth, filled with all those fangs, and says,  _all the better to bite you with, my dear_. And the girl- red riding hood, she says, uh.”

Derek can feel his back teeth sharpening, his eyes boiling blue. “Red riding hood says,  _I’ve always wanted a mouth of fangs_. The wolf looks at her, confused.  _But you’re a little girl,_ he says.  _Little girls aren’t supposed to want big, sharp teeth like mine_.”

“Huh. Tess had a thing for weird stories.”

“She did,” Derek says, and the laugh that bubbles out of his throat surprises him more than it does her. “She- yeah, she did. I, uh. Where was I-? And the wolf- the girl, I mean, she smiles from underneath her hood, and says,  _who’s to say I’m like those girls? You know nothing of what’s inside this cloak._ Andthe wolf looks at her again- really, really looks at her, and he can see something under her skin, howling. And he can feel his own howl, under his fur, because- because that’s how he is, and that’s how it’ll always be. And-”

Derek can’t look at her. He can’t, and he should be stronger than this, but he’s not and she smells like poison more than anything else. “And the wolf says,  _you should be at home with your grandmother. It’s safer there, there’s no danger in those parts of the woods_. And the girl looks straight back at him, unflinching and- and bold, and brave, and brilliant. And she says,  _tell me, wolf. Why do you think I wear this red cloak_?”

Grace’s eyelids are drooping now, and Derek starts to speak faster: “And- and the wolf, he says,  _why do you wear it_? And the girl keeps looking at him, because she’s never been afraid of deep, dark things, because she knows- she knows that there’s light inside, that there’s a- fire. Burning at the centre of him. And she looks at him, and doesn’t stop looking at him, and she says,  _there is a wolf in all of us. Ours is just more prominent.”_

Derek’s throat clicks, twice, swallowing fast. “And she takes off her hood, and her eyes are the same red as her hood, and the hunter from before, he- he comes in with his musket, and-”

“Does this have a happy ending?”

It’s slurred, and Derek half-winces. “What?”

“This story,” Grace says. “Does it have a happy ending?”

Derek wants to laugh. Wants to say,  _when have you ever heard a fairytale where the wolf gets a happy ending_?

He feels cheated, like his mother had lied to him about the two wolves defeating the hunter and living happily ever after, because he knows by now that no-one gets happy endings, least of all the big bad wolf.

Instead, they get their bellies cut open and filled with rocks, rolled into a lake and left to drown. They get hoat coals, or being hung up on a mantle.

There’s a reason it’s ‘ _who’s afraid of the big bad wolf_ ’- because wolves are howling and hungry and leave claw-marks on little girl’s hoods.

But he gives the same answer that Laura had asked when their mom had told them: “Of course. I’m not finished yet.”

Grace hums, shifting her head on the pillow. “Don’t think ‘m gonna keep awake ‘til then.”

“Just for a little while longer-”

“S’rry,” Grace mumbles, and it gets lost in the sheets. “Give Laura m’ love. An’- an’ come back later, ‘kay? I wanna know how it ends.”

Derek’s not going to come back- he has a flight booked for the next morning, and he has to get going if he wants to meet Laura in time, and she only has a few months left anyway, and he knows all of this when he says, “Okay.”

Grace’s smile wobbles on her lips, but then her eyelids are fluttering closed and her hand goes limp and her breathing is evening out, until the only sounds Derek can hear are the soft inhale-exhale, the feeble pounding of Grace’s heart, and the monotonous beep of the machines.

Derek watches her for a few seconds, until he’s sure she’s fully asleep, before taking her hand.

He keeps his eyes on the pale cast of her skin, and makes sure his claws don’t come out as he steals some of her pain, the black crawling up his veins and dissolving when it gets to his elbow.

He keeps doing that for three minutes, until his arm is almost swarming with it, until he can’t stand up without breathing in sharply and buckling slightly.

When he breathes in again, there’s the stench of dying that’s always in a hospital, arsenic and blood clots and something killing you from the inside out.

These days, it’s always the ghost sensation of ash under his tongue.

“I’m sorry I can’t do more,” he tells her, and leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> I loathe everything.


End file.
